


More than the Gift

by Code16



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/F, Genderswap, Non-Consensual Touching, Sauron is creepy, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:47:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23870308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Code16/pseuds/Code16
Summary: "She shaped your prison as she shaped the wonders she had brought to tempt you with, as she shaped a thousand workings with your hands beside hers, as she shaped the ring that shines on her finger. As she shaped all her gifts.She is genius and creator and you scream without sound again under her creations’ eyes.You love her."
Relationships: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Sauron | Mairon
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	More than the Gift

You love her.

She commands her troops from a balcony. You are in audience - the orcs hammered metal spikes through you, to hold you to the wall, high enough for the view below. She held your chin with her fingers (her touch burned. Her touch always burns). Her power circled your head like a mockery of a crown, dripped from it like jewels. Burned like stinging ice across your eyelids. You can’t close your eyes.

She wanted you to see. _That your kin have no chance against me, that your land will burn before me. There is no purpose in what you do_. The orcs stand in hundreds; their weapons bristle at the sky. They will tear apart the land as they did your city, tear apart Elves and Men as they tore apart what was left of those you loved. They are horror and ruin, black smoke and ash on the horizon of the world. They quail at her voice. She will command them to it all.

They are here by her will, assembled by her power, organized to rank and purpose by the force she is. She is brilliant, and horrible.

You love her.

~

You love her. 

The guards have whipped you until there isn’t an inch you can move without agony. Seared hot iron into your skin. You try to read the pattern of the marks, but your eyes cloud grey and black. You always know when it is her tools they use, you always know when her hands replace theirs. Her hands in sharp black armor drag across what remains of your body, and you haven’t screamed truly in days, your throat too torn for sound, but you scream. 

It is her power that knits you whole enough to tear apart anew, that you can feel in every fiber and in every cell. It is her tools that hold you in fire and in breath when you had collapsed at the guards’ feet insensate, that draw new agony from you when you thought your nerves had nothing left to give. Her runes and jewels in the walls that mean your mind cannot run to shout alarm to your brethren beyond, that you cannot will your life from your body.

She shaped them as she shaped the wonders she had brought to tempt you with, as she shaped a thousand workings with your hands beside hers, as she shaped the ring that shines on her finger. As she shaped all her gifts.

She is genius and creator and you scream without sound again under her creations’ eyes.

You love her.

~

You love her.

You did not understand, before. How is it, you had wondered, in the days of the old Age’s wars, in the days after. That the Moringotto is beloved by her siblings, that they love her still, in the face of all she did. For all the questions you had asked of Elves and Men, this one you did not voice, beyond in your prayers.

Of all your prayers, this one has been answered for you. Perhaps you of all should have known, by the blood in your veins, by the star on your banners. Everything you love is still in the one you love. Twisted into shapes with jagged edges, half drowned in syruping dark, corrupted in its direction as a forge hammer sinking into blood and bone. Eluding reaching grasp like light behind a mirror; undowsed like the Flame Eternal, reflected back in a thousand taunting perverted shards. 

You loved her for her brilliance and her will, for her creations and her hands, for her words. For her disdain of bonds, for her dreams beyond the mountains and the skies.

You love her.

~

You cannot feel your hands. You would cry for them, but you spent your tears, on your city, on your people whose bodies had littered the streets, who had looked to you for peace and shelter. Who you had promised. Who you had betrayed. (You would cry for them, but your hands are betrayal and the work of your hands is death, and you should burn your forge to the ground, if it stood, before you entered it, melt your tools in the flames before you would pick them up. It is - easier this way, maybe.) (You would cry for them, but you can only dread the moment you feel them again.)

You can feel her hands, when she cradles you. Caresses your cheek with her hand unarmored, holds your hair back from your face (it sticks in blood and grime). _“There is no need for this. We can end it, all of it. I only need to know…”_

 _“You’re beautiful,”_ you say to her, but you never know if your tongue forms words any longer. If she will hear any words but those she wishes.

~

You love her.

Sixteen rings you have given up. You did not know how to endure, then, destruction and grief an open wound, collapse of past and future and present at once crushing at your fea as stone and metal crushed its living vessel. Burned to the bone, in everything you’d hoped and lived for, in chains on the tower’s stones. 

Your kin were your last vestiges of endurance, last fear and hope, last betrayal you will not commit. But they are far, and the walls shroud you behind dark power, and in your dreams they are dead, and they laugh at you and curse you from beyond the sea and tell you it is futile to keep on. (Your grandmother’s eldest, you know, endured decades, defied the Moringotto for centuries after. Your grandmother’s eldest, they say, is second only to the Dark Enemy in blood she spilled. Surrounded by shadows, you feared you would not last weeks.)

She is beside you. She sits and holds your head on robes embroidered with her sigil’s eye; she is outlined in the fire as metal heats anew to tear away your skin and voice and will. She is brilliant and beautiful, and she is darkness more solid than any shadow, and she is every gift she has ever given you, and you understand, and you will endure a thousand Ages now. You cannot feel your hands, but there is only one gift, now, that you can give her in return.

~

You love her.

Sauron throws shattered glimpses of Annatar at you in a thousand shards of jagged, twisted glass. Evil, your prayer whispers back to you, must begin to devour the one it rises from before it can devour others. Mairon, the stories say, was consumed before the Eldar crossed the sea, before the first War. But Annatar kissed you in the rays of dawn, forged tools that tilled the fields and built the homes of Elves and Men, sat by you as you read disputes and by her words your justice was more fair and true. Your love is the Lady of Lies, but she has brought out her lies before you as needles for your torment, and you trace the fragile shapes of truth behind them, and you know that the most twisted mirror will reflect still only nothing if nothing is there. 

She has done evil beyond reckoning, beyond counting, she is drowned in the shadow and consumed by darkness a thousandfold, and you are stripped bare, and you cannot draw enough of you from shadow to kindle a lamp for her, cannot put enough of yourself together to reach to her. And there is only one gift that you can give.

 _“I’ll never tell you,”_ you say, and her eyes are hard and burn as the coals under the iron, and she stands, and her commands are sharp as the knives they call for. But you will cling to your gift when you can cling to nothing else.

You made your rings with your love’s dreams and genius, with the memory of her hands on yours, and Sauron will not have them, and that which has taken her will not take them as another tool to bind her to itself. 

Your love is the Lady of Lies and she is the Lady of Gifts; your love stands before you outlined in flame, and your love is farther than across the sea. You cannot remember any touch but fire. Your future is agony and her future is smoke swept across the breadth of the land.

 _I’ll never tell,_ you shape with bloody lips, and there are three rings and there are three words you say and three words you never say and they are the same, and she is beautiful and brilliant and you can scream under her hands again. 

(You love her. You love her. You love her. You love her. You love her.)

~

( _“I’m sorry,”_ you say. _“I would have tried for you, if I’d known. If I’d known in time. I would have reached for you.”_

You don’t know if she hears.)

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the quote "Love the giver more than the gift", which seems to be generally attributed to Brigham Young but I failed to find its actual context.
> 
> In case this needs saying, the kind of thing this fic depicts is generally not a good idea in real life.
> 
> [My tumblr for these kinds of things](http://findundergrounddragoutofwater.tumblr.com/). I love fandom social things, and anyone who feels like they might want to message etc me for any reason is encouraged to totally do so.


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